Chapter 5 #2
Down one more flight.
The engine bay at the bottom of the stairs is bright with late morning.
Two engines are in. A new probie is on the tailboard of Engine 9 cleaning a coupling that doesn't need cleaning.
Dani Serrano is in the far corner by the turnout racks running her hand along a strap and examining the stitching, her head tipped the way it tips when she is looking at something she is not yet ready to name.
She sees me come out of the stairwell. She doesn't nod.
She doesn't come over. She looks a second longer than a look.
“Max.” Dani's voice.
I cross to her.
"Ma'am."
"Everything all right upstairs?”
"Yes." Max responded.
"You look rough." Dani looked concerned.
"Long night."
"What were you up to?”
The third person in an hour has asked me where I was last night.
Dani asks it as a friend, not as Val asks it.
Dani means are you okay, did you sleep, did you eat.
Dani has been asking me that question for seven years in exactly that tone and has been my closest approximation of a friend in this house in all that time.
I look at her. I look at her face, the careful flat read of it, the way her eyes sit on me without blinking.
"Cabin," I say.
"The northwest one."
"Yes."
“Still working on it?” Dani tipped her head to the side, the light catching on her ponytail.
"I finished the porch two summers ago."
"Right, sorry I forgot."
She hasn't forgotten. Dani does not forget porches or summers or the year I finished the porch, because Dani helped me frame two of the joists in a weekend in 2019 when I was still learning to drive a nail with my off hand. She has not forgotten. She has chosen to sound like she forgot.
"I need to run drills tonight with your crew,” I say.
"Yeah. I heard."
“You need anything else?” I ask her.
She looks at me. She looks at me in a way that is neither good nor bad. It is the look Dani has when she has something she might say and is choosing not to say it yet.
"Nothing else," Dani says. "Go eat."
"Okay."
“Max?”
"Yeah."
"You'd tell me if anything was off?”
"Nothing's off."
"Okay."
"Okay."
I walk past her.
I walk past the engine and the probie and the turnout racks and out the bay door into the yard and around to the side of the building where the fence comes close to the wall and the smokers stand.
I don't smoke. I haven't smoked since I was twenty-four.
I stand in the small sliver of shade where the smokers stand and I put my back against the brick and I look up at the square of sky over the station roof.
Evangeline Clark is in my bed.
The sentence comes at me whole. I have been pushing it down with one hand for an hour and the hand has gotten tired.
She is in my bed. She is in a flannel shirt of mine that will smell like her by tonight.
She is in a kitchen I have cooked in alone for nine years and she has washed a bowl and a spoon in the sink.
She put her wedding ring in a white dish on the dresser.
I watched her take the ring off. I watched her take the ring off and I stood in the doorway with my hands at my sides and I did not move because if I had moved I would have crossed the room to her.
I am thinking about crossing the room and taking her in my arms.
I have been thinking about crossing the room since I laid her on the quilt at three in the morning.
I have been thinking about it through an oatmeal breakfast and a mug of coffee and a conversation about Millard and a conversation about the propane and a conversation about the landline.
I have been thinking about crossing the room the whole time I was telling her things she needed to hear in order to be safe.
I am thinking about it now, with my back against the brick and my lies to Val still warm on my mouth.
I have not touched her. Evangeline.
I am not going to touch her. Not today. Not tomorrow. Probably not ever.
But, I want to.
She is sleeping off smoke inhalation in a bed that has nothing in it but her own body and a quilt.
She has buried a husband in her head in the last eight hours.
I am a woman who carried her out of a house on fire and I am a woman who set the house on fire and I am the last person she can afford to have touch her.
I know what I am and I know what I am not going to do.
I think about crossing the room anyway.
I think about fucking her. Having her come apart beneath me.
The animal part, the one that made a sound in the third-floor hallway when I saw her under the window, is not gone.
It was not burned off in the carry. It was not washed off at my kitchen sink.
It is lower in me now. It has put its head down and closed its eyes, and it knows where the bed is, and it is waiting.
I push off the wall.
Drills. Four minutes on the two-story. A crew that has gone soft on live burns.
A probie who is going to get somebody killed in six months if I don't ride her on the coupling routine.
A chief upstairs who noticed my head wasn't where it needed to be and told me to prove her wrong.
A woman forty miles northwest of here in my flannel shirt who I want to fuck.
I have work to do.
I go back in through the bay.
The probie is still polishing the coupling. I walk up and I take it out of her hand and I put it back on the rack.
"Warren."
"Chief."
She says Chief because they all say Chief to me now. It still catches in me. Nineteen days of this and I have not adjusted yet. I have been Lieutenant for a year and I have been back as Deputy Chief for nineteen days and the word out of a probie's mouth still runs a half step ahead of my ears.
"Your crew is running the two-story. You're going to be in it. I'm going to watch you."
"Yes, Chief."
"You've been cleaning that coupling for twenty minutes."
"Sorry, Chief."
"Do something real. Check every SCBA on the rack. Log the pressure. If any tank is under ninety percent, you swap it. If any strap has a crack bigger than a sixteenth, you flag it. If anything on that rack isn't where it should be, you fix it before you go upstairs for chow."
"Yes, Chief."
"Don't say yes, Chief to me like that. Say it like you mean it."
"Yes, Chief."
"Go."
She goes. I watch her go. I watch her clear the bay.
Dani is not in the corner anymore. She has gone into the ready room or upstairs or outside.
She has left me the bay. That's a thing Dani does.
When she has something she might say and decides not to say it, she gives you the room you're both in and goes away.
I cross to the turnout rack. I put my hand on my own coat, hung in the third slot from the end, the slot that has had my name on it for eleven years except for the year it didn't. I close my eyes.
The woman in my bed.
The lies.
The yes, Chief that came out steady.
The cabin forty miles northwest.
The arrangement I have had with Val for fourteen years that I have just, in a stairwell in the last ten minutes, begun to have a second version of.
A second, secret version that does not have Val's name on it.
A second version that sits under the first one the way a second floor sits under a roof, holding it up, invisible from the street.
I take my hand off the coat.
I have drills coming up.
I have time to drive to a diner across the river and eat something.
I have time to get a second cup of coffee.
I have time to run the route home in my head, which I have now apparently started doing, which is new, the way counting my lies is new, the way the word home now pointing at a cabin instead of at an apartment is new.
I walk out of the bay with my keys in my hand, and at the door I stop and I make myself put the keys back in my pocket and pick up a radio off the charger instead, because I am a deputy chief on shift and I am not going to stand in a parking lot and think about a woman in my bed while a probie is logging pressures and a chief upstairs is watching me prove her wrong.
I clip the radio to my belt.
I go back to work.